SyncStrength quantifies team chemistry to give football managers the edge

This article was taken from the September 2013 issue of
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Football clubs spend millions signing players, but how do they
ensure new arrivals fit in? Researchers in Boston are investigating
managers' inklings, by quantifying team chemistry.

Daniel McCaffrey and Kevin Bickart, cofounders of SyncStrength, a
sports-analytics company, originally trained in neuroscience and
cognitive psychology. They raided these fields for a notion called
synchrony. Over the past four decades, psychologists have measured
the correlation between people's physical behaviour -- such as eye
contact and body language -- and physiological reactions, such as heart rate, while they
interact in different scenarios. When people are "in sync"
physiologically, they tend to do better. "We looked at the
synchrony between changes in football players' heart rates
through a game," Bickart says. "We thought that would provide an
objective way of assessing something as vague as team
chemistry."

The pair found that players whose heart rates rose and fell in
sync tended to perform better in discrete events such as creating
chances and scoring goals. Poor synchrony corresponded to negative
events -- players letting an opponent past them, say. "The next
step is trying to identify the unique patterns of behaviour and the
unique individuals within the group. We want to apply this to
scouting, so managers know which players are likely to play the
best together, in certain situations -- in injury time, who's the
best person to put on?"